Forum Discussion
Starting a Learning Design Business
Hello E-Learning Heroes community! I'm Erin from Toronto, Ontario Canada.
I'm an instructional designer, currently in the process of opening my own business (website coming soon!).
I have some ideas on next steps, but I would love to hear from anyone who has launched their on instructional design business. What did you do to market yourself?
2 Replies
Tagging in a few folks who I know have done this—
rachelatkaiser I bet is going to have some really strong insight for you since she's been running her own business for 10+ years at this point.JodiSansone has also been doing independent work for quite some time.
And, I'm sure there are others I haven't tagged here, who I hope will chime in too.I've personally done some consulting in the community space and not the e-learning space, but my guess is that for freelancers folks are going to fall into two categories:
1) people who are building their businesses through lots of smaller projects and clients who use consistent outbound marketing (email, website, partnerships, communities, etc)
2) people who have a small client roster who keeps them on retainer, who probably operate almost exclusively through referrals
^I'd be interested to see if that impression squares with the folks I've tagged in, and others.Thank you for your response Noelle. I think I fall into category 1. I'm going to have to market myself, at least to start.
I've complete my website here: https://erinparks.ca, and will be launching in the next couple weeks with some social media posts, a blog, and honestly, asking everyone I know to share my website with their people.
I would love to hear from JodiSansone and rachelatkaiser, or anyone who has the time to share, what marketing avenues have worked best for you?
I believe there's a Canadian presence in this community, so fellow Canadian Heroes, are there avenues that work best in our markets? Groups that are particularly useful to belong to? (Aside from this one, of course).
